


A Different Man

by Cunien



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Angst, Anne/Aramis, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Lots of Angst, Milady - Freeform, Potentially Aramis/Athos if you're that way inclined
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-07
Updated: 2014-05-07
Packaged: 2018-01-23 22:08:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1581164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cunien/pseuds/Cunien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Athos really </em>had<em> looked upon him like a child, a child who cannot help himself and wants only more and more of what he is told he cannot have. Athos had been so sure that Aramis’ soul was a bright and clean sheet of paper marked only with the dark stain of Savoy. Because he laughed, because he fucked and fought and lived with a smile on his face.</em></p>
<p>
  <em>But now he sees - really sees - the same grief, the same stomach-churning, bone-breaking heave of love and guilt and self-hate that Athos himself feels like a great roiling wave threatening to rise up and drown him, when he wakes in the morning and when he sleeps at night, and every single moment in between.</em>
</p>
<p>A one-shot, Athos is angry with Aramis after the end of the season 1 finale, and begins to realise that he has mis-judged his friend's character for a very long time. Warnings for a bit of language. Could be see as Aramis/Athos if you squint.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Different Man

Aramis’ back hits the wall with a judder that Athos can feel through the palm he has spread against the other man’s chest. There’s a moment of shock and question in Aramis’ eyes, before the knowledge settles like a dying flame there. It’s plain he knows what this is about, since its been hanging over their heads like a hulking grey pall of smoke since that morning in the convent, weeks ago. Athos can see the moment Aramis tries to force the blankness into his eyes, the emptiness he’s been working hard at lately, but it’s never enough: Aramis has eyes that speak like his soul. For all his indiscretions and intrigues it’s never been _lying_ that Aramis is good at, only, perhaps, charming his way out of the consequences.

Not this time. Not if someone asks the right questions, and sees the answer plain as day in those clear brown eyes.

“You can’t help yourself, can you?” Athos asks, stepping away, and he’s surprised by the note of sadness there, real and ringing like a bell. He feels his muscles tight and unforgiving in his back, tensed hard since they’d left the palace, and then, the tavern. Now in the privacy of the leafy little courtyard that Aramis’ rooms open out onto Athos can let it go, like the contraction of a finger around a trigger.

Aramis, for once, has nothing to say. He looks at Athos for a moment, with those clear shining eyes bright even in the moonlight, before looking down at this boots. All the air seems to have gone out of him.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he says, voice flat and curiously blank, “I know it. I’ll not go near her again, or her child - no nearer than my duty as a Musketeer dictates.”

“That’s not enough, Aramis,” Athos says. “Distance is not enough.”

“Then what else would you ask of me?”

“It’s not _I_ that asks this of you, for God’s sake Aramis,” Athos says, anger rising now like a bright hot tide inside him. “This is not for _me_.”

“I’m trying, Athos.

“Not hard enough!” Athos steps away, paces a short distance, takes off his hat and runs his hand through his hair. He stops and turns to look at the other man. “The Cardinal is not a fool. When you bow, you don’t even lower your eyes - you _watch_ her. It is impudent, and it is _stupid_ , and we will all hang for your lover’s arrogance.”

Aramis leans against the wall, doesn’t even look up when he speaks. “So I should be like you? I could never be so…”

“So what? Cold?”

“That’s not what I was going to say, Athos. But I cannot turn away and pretend that child is not mine.”

Athos stares at him, the terrible curl of fear deep inside him stoking his anger into something hot and hard. “My God,” he laughs, and it comes out bitter and curled. “You’re proud, aren’t you? Proud that you could fuck a queen? That you could plant a seed in her belly when even a king could not?” Athos spits the words, hurls them out like sharp little blades. He wants to be cruel, wants it to hurt.

“Do you think yourself her equal? Because you’re not, Aramis, and you never will be.”

Aramis drains white, and there’s something tight and shaking in his face. He looks for a moment as though he will hit him, and Athos invites it, feels the call to violence and anger singing in his bones. He wants to fight, wants to hold Aramis down and pound his fist into his face until he sees just how very very _stupid_ he has been.

“You think I….because she was the Queen?” Aramis’ voice is still and quiet.

“Or maybe because she was willing,” Athos snaps. He knows the way it sounds, as though he thinks the other man little better than a whore, but he can’t help himself.

“Say one or the other, Athos,” Aramis shouts, throwing up his hands, “Say it was because she was a Queen or a woman, but not both!”

“Then tell me which it was.”

Aramis deflates, his shoulders dropping from their angry hunch. “Because she was Anne, and we needed each other that night. Do you imagine that you are the only one who has loved and lost? That the Comte de la Fere has the monopoly on pain?”

And it startles Athos, because there _is_ pain in Aramis’ eyes, real and vivid like the flashing of a blade in the moonlight. Aramis, who loves like a child, easy as breathing. But Athos recognises the darkness there now, and it’s like a sudden gust of wind that knocks him from his feet, because it’s the same thing that he sees gazing back from his own eyes, should he ever dare to look at himself in a mirror.

Athos’ anger leaves him in the silence between them, swift as a retreating tide. The guilt comes like a rush to fill the space, the shame that he has so misunderstood his friend, and for so long. 

Athos really _had_ looked upon him like a child, a child who cannot help himself and wants only more and more of what he is told he cannot have. Athos had been so sure that Aramis’ soul was a bright and clean sheet of paper marked only with the dark stain of Savoy. Because he laughed, because he fucked and fought and lived with a smile on his face.

But now he sees - really sees - the same grief, the same stomach-churning, bone-breaking heave of love and guilt and self-hate that Athos himself feels like a great roiling wave threatening to rise up and drown him, when he wakes in the morning and when he sleeps at night, and every single moment in between.

Athos is stunned, left opening and closing his mouth in silence. “I am sorry,” he says, and his voice is cracked and dry, “I’ve wronged you, Aramis. I am sorry.”

They put their backs to the wall and slide down until they’re sitting, side by side, the warm press of bodies from shoulder to waist. It takes a while for Aramis to speak, a hand coming to wipe at a tear or two. 

“In the convent…” he begins, but Athos shakes his head and puts a hand on the other man’s knee, “You don’t have to.”

“But I want to, Athos.”

Athos nods, once, because he knows that Aramis needs this permission, to lay it all bare at his feet.

“There was a woman in the convent - I had known her, a long time ago. Loved her. Perhaps the only woman I have ever loved, truly. We were to be married, she was with child, and then….she lost the baby. And took herself away to a convent because she knew me, Athos, she knew me too well.”

He takes a shuddering breath, and says, “I can never be a father, or a husband. I am not made to love, only to _need_ , and to take. It is not a King that I wish to be - only an ordinary man, with an ordinary heart. But I am…” he spreads his hands wide. “This. Just this.”

Athos is silent, lets his hands fall down from where it rested on Aramis’ knee until it finds the other man’s hand, loose and open on the ground between them. He threads his own fingers through Aramis’, frowns at the strangeness, the intimacy of the moment.

“Aramis,” Athos says. He feels awkward, has never been good at the easy familiarity of words and actions that Porthos lives and breathes. He takes a breath and pushes past his unease, because he knows they both need this, “You could never be _just_ anything. You are a good man.”

“But I want more. I want children and a wife and a home, Athos. I have wanted it for a long time. I want...to be a different man.”

There’s nothing to be said to that, nothing that Athos, the leader of their small group, can possibly say to make it otherwise. Aramis is who he is. Athos wants to believe that a man can change, can be _better_ , can be healed, but he’s yet to find out quite how one would go about it. He has found though - when he can think on the matter with any kind of coherency through the numbing buzz of wine and sadness - that all he can do is live one day at a time like putting one foot in front of the other, and surround himself with good people, people that can pull him out of himself long enough to let him breathe free air, people he would die for in an instant: kings, commanders and brothers.

But what advice can he give? Athos, who for so long has believed himself shattered beyond repair? With Milady gone and his dark secret known to his dearest friends, friends who did not recoil from him, Athos has begun to feel as though there might a future that stretches further than one day at a time. But he did not walk away from his wife healed and whole once more, and it’s still so hard, the burden of grief sitting heavy and hard like a stone at the bottom of his stomach. How could he hope to help Aramis?

If Porthos were here, he wouldn’t need words. He’d pull Aramis pliant and shaking into the circle of his arms, easy and free with himself, soothing hands carding through Aramis’ tangled curls. But Athos cannot be that man, when even the intimacy of this moment is almost too much for him to bear, and Porthos does not know - Porthos can never know. 

Athos is all Aramis has in this, and he has to be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> This all came about because I noticed that, while everyone else respectfully averts their eyes, Aramis can't _not_ stare boldy when he bows to the Queen. And there are people watching. And they are not stupid.
> 
> Also because Athos' "I can't believe you slept with the Queen!" was so brilliant, one of the few times we see Athos' cool exterior crack, and he is really not "good" with the whole situation.
> 
> And also because I like angry dialogue, and I like making Aramis hurt.
> 
> This was a very quick one-shot that came out of nowhere today, not beta-ed, apologies for clunkiness.


End file.
